I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

That sounds like Anthony Soprano. He has a point. I've said it before: if you're black and you sell dope, you end up in the big house; if you're white and you sell a large amount of dope, you end up visiting the White House. So it's a matter of race and it's a matter of scale, frankly.

Shane Salerno and I adapted my book Savages together, and I learned a lot about adaptation. I think it's an extremely difficult thing to do; adaptation might even be more difficult than writing an original screenplay. It's so much a matter of choices, making choices of what to leave in. It was an education.

If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.

I've been writing since I was six years old. It's hard to imagine stopping. I would hate to think that I've already written my best book.